Monday, August 29, 2011

Wheatley, Sallust and Il Duce

As I have already noted on this site, Wheatley was an admirer of Mussolini.
Black August, set some fifty years after it was written in an imagined post-revolutionary England, cites him as one of the most influential figures of the recent past (while ignoring Hitler entirely), and as late as in the autobiographies he was preparing at the very end of his life Wheatley defended Il Duce for having "done a splendid job in cleaning up Italy", and mourned the "later megalomania (that) led him to throw in his lot with Hitler" as "one of the greatest tragedies in history."
(It is certainly ironic that history generally represents him as one of the monsters of the Second World War, almost when not entirely on a par with Hitler, while the truly monstrous Stalin is allowed a seat with the heroes.)
Wheatley took a keen and informed interest in international affairs through the thirties, and it is notable how often issues relating to Mussolini's Italy crop up in his pages around this time. It is just possible, in fact, that his interest in the subject may have influenced the return of Gregory Sallust in Contraband.

I must stress that what follows here is purest speculation: I am not making a case, indeed I have far from convinced myself. But it is at least persuasive, and at least consistent with Wheatley's established method and habit.
We have seen how Wheatley allows his reading to leak into his work. Often the pattern seems to be a stray reference appearing in one book (when the subject is new to him) followed by a more deeply threaded allusion in a subsequent one, after he has digested it more fully.
A good example is the use of Huxley's Brave New World as, first, the subject of a Hollywood film in Such Power is Dangerous and then as the major structural informant of Black August, while here at the excellent Dennis Wheatley website, a contributor notes how a stray reference to Powys's Glastonbury Romance in Black August likewise announces the book's more considered use as an influence on the plot of The Fabulous Valley. As well as receiving full length treatment in two non-fiction works, Wheatley's thirties novels similarly abound in references to the Russian Revolution and the life of Charles II.

His interest in Fascist Italy is most obviously reflected in The Secret War, which is set against the backdrop of the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, and reflects, I think, Wheatley's genuinely undecided views on that campaign: the book, as I shall explain further in the next post, reads almost like Wheatley's argument with himself on the subject. The use of the subject goes beyond background detail, and reflects a deep and informed interest. In Drink and Ink he writes of an occasion when he was travelling in Italy at the time of the invasion, and with the prospect of war between Italy and Britain seeming likely he considered hiring a fishing boat to take him to the South of France and avoid internment.
So we know for sure that this was a subject very much on his mind at this time: what grounds are there for linking it with the reappearance of Gregory Sallust?

The question I raised in my post on Contraband was this: why did Wheatley revive Sallust in a totally incompatible time period and with many of his most significant characteristics from his first appearance muted or changed? Why not simply invent a new character with a new name?
Well, let us begin with that surname. I haven't speculated on the nature of any link with his Roman historian namesake until now because I had presumed that there wasn't one, and it remains likely that there was no particular reason why the name had been chosen at first.
But by the time of the character's reappearance in Contraband it is possible that Wheatley's reacquaintance with the original Sallust may have prompted Gregory Sallust's comeback.

One of the few real-life figures namechecked in Secret War is General Graziani. The key military figure in Italy's African wars, he was a fascist cult hero, and a deeply charismatic individual who liked to portray himself as a romantic idealist and intellectual, and to compare himself with the great military leaders of Ancient Rome. I'm only surprised that he doesn't play more of a hands-on role in the book: he strikes me as exactly the kind of man to have appealed to Wheatley's sense of imperial grandeur. Whenever he needed guidance or inspiration, he would claim, he would turn to his "lords and masters": Caesar, Tacitus, Livy - and Sallust.
Sallust (more properly Gaius Sallustius Crispus) was Wheatley's kind of historian: partisan, rowdy, patriotic and with a reputation for immorality that resulted in his temporary banishment from the Roman Senate. His books have something of the sparky, belligerent flavour of Old Rowley and Red Eagle.In 46 BC he joined Caesar in his African campaign, leading to his appointment as governor of the province of Africa Nova, hence his idolisation by Granziani. It seems certain that in his study of Graziani and the African campaign, therefore, Wheatley would have been reminded of Gregory Sallust by reading of his ancient namesake.

It may have been at this point that he first entertained the idea of reusing Sallust rather than invent a new character in his forthcoming Contraband. It's a slender reed on which to hang a hypothesis of this sort, I admit, but there is one other link that just might push it from possible to plausible.
The original Sallust was born at Amiternum in the country of the Sabines. Is it mere coincidence, therefore, that the all-new 1930s model Gregory Sallust should be given as love interest a woman named Sabine Szenty?